Where might you observe both form policing and labour pains? What’s the difference at a casino between a flea, a vulture and a fish? Who talks about plate spinning, monkey branching and hard nexting? Why would a devotee of competitive eating (otherwise known as a gurgitator) exploit a manual typewriter yet shun the Roman method? Should you worry if a sommelier tells a colleague you are a whale and ready to drop the hammer? If a doctor identifies you as a Honda, is that praise or disapproval; and how should you feel when prescribed a therapeutic wait?
This handsomely produced volume, a field guide to the esoteric languages of different professions and tribes, provides answers to all these questions and many more. Its author Ben Schott revels in collecting and explaining the argot of cab drivers, booksellers, stunt performers and dog walkers. It’s more than 20 years since he made his name with Schott’s Original Miscellany, which bulged inside countless Christmas stockings and attracted clowders of copycats. He retains his appetite for curious information (about, say, editing techniques for reality TV shows, or the £6 that Vic Flick was paid for contributing the guitar riff to the James Bond theme) and for conveying it in quirkily amusing terms.
If a doctor identifies you as a Honda, is that praise or disapproval?
Schott’s great interest is taxonomy. How do we organise what we know, and how might we do it differently? How do specific social groups use language to bind themselves together and keep outsiders at arm’s length? His inspiration was a boyhood encounter with the work of Iona and Peter Opie, who in the 1950s minutely studied the lore and vocabulary of schoolchildren. Like them, he sees the virtue in taking seriously what’s usually treated as trivial, and perceives metaphorical verdure where others tend to see flimsy transience – in jeers, puns, epithets, quips, superstitions and slogans.
As keen as ever on unexpected openings (his Original Miscellany began with golf lingo and details of an 18th-century hat tax), Schott focuses on the arcane realm of Venetian gondoliers in his first chapter. Those who have no ancestral link to the profession are trovài (foundlings); those with many family connections to it are del ceppo (ceppo is a wooden stump, the idea being that they’re chips off the old block).
Charming this may be, but it’s an odd place to start, given that the book is implicitly a celebration of the multifariousness and plasticity of English. Those attributes are most palpable when Schott writes about cryptocurrency, espionage and American political language. One of the strongest of his 53 short chapters surveys fox hunting: hunters’ terminology is presented in black and that of saboteurs in red (a reversal of the colours that the two constituencies typically wear).
At times it feels as if Schott is bestowing a special key with which the reader may unlock some secret vault of soigné opulence. Although he includes snapshots of classic Italian gesticulations and the hand signals used to communicate with South African drivers, he is more at home among diamond fanciers, auctioneers and the timeless idiosyncrasies of St James’s clubland. Sport is represented here not by football or cricket but by the Cresta Run (once described by Clement Freud as ‘the most reliable laxative imaginable’). While followers of Taylor Swift and of dietary fads get a look-in, there’s far more about Savile Row tailors, for whom trousers are ‘drums’ and a botched garment is ‘pork’.
There are tips and insights that readers will want to milk: how to deter paparazzi or, perhaps more immediately useful, what not to say when visiting Santa’s grotto. Apparently you can persuade a bartender that you work in the industry by ordering a shot of Jeppson’s Malört – but it’s worth bearing in mind that a recent New York Times report of its growing popularity mentioned that it ‘tastes a little like sucking dandelion juice through a straw made of car tyres’.
This is a book for dipping into, and therefore probably doomed to be described as ‘eminently giftable’. Yet it’s too rich and chewy and brain-tickling simply to be consigned to a shelf above the loo. There’s plenty here to titillate logophiles, collectors of trivia and setters of pub quizzes as well as amateur social anthropologists. Take the chapter on graffiti: having acknowledged that it is criminal vandalism, Schott goes on to give an informative account of a phenomenon he characterises as a ‘private conversation on which passers-by eavesdrop without understanding’. Tuning into its idiom – and the poetry, be it sour or sweet, of other subcultures – makes one see a corner of the world anew.
These are the answers to the questions at the start: 1. The gym. 2. They are, respectively, tight-fisted, apt to prowl the floor looking for dropped money, and easily exploited. 3. Inhabitants of the manosphere, the online home of misogyny. 4. One is a technique for eating corn on the cob; the other means vomiting mid-contest. 5. You’re a big spender, on a spree. 6. It stands for hypertensive, obese, noncompliant, diabetic alcoholic. The prescription implies that you have been obnoxious and should not be seen in a hurry.
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